DYN's DDos Internet Knockout (Infographic)

By Jake Rheude, Red Stag Fulfillment

By now, you will have heard about the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that took out websites on the East Coast and across the United States. Websites of all stripes had some level of internet service outage starting Friday morning, including the New York Times, Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, Netflix, Yelp, Pinterest, DirecTV, Box.com, and Ticketfly. Most alarming for online sellers, popular ecommerce sites went black, including Etsy, PayPal, and Shopify. Some Squarespace sites were affected and even some parts of Amazon’s enormous web domain fell prey to the hacker attack.

Chart Source: RedStagFulfillment.com

Consider this malicious DDoS attack a warning and a wake-up call for ecommerce sellers. When online stores vanish from the web on October 21, that’s bad. If that same attack hits on Cyber Monday or any of the peak ecommerce sales days between Thanksgiving and mid-December, it could be a disaster. As hackers grow more sophisticated, the question is not if more cyber attacks will hit the web but when.

This is a good time to ask yourself how well your business is prepared to handle a malicious attack. Do you use backup servers for your ecommerce store? Do you routinely backup your storefront? How well is the ecommerce platform you sell on insulated from cyberattack?

Your online shop isn’t the only segment of your business that could be affected by hacker attacks, however. You could be humming along, taking customer orders in New York and turning over product, but if your fulfillment center in Ohio loses power or internet (or both) in a freak storm, those orders will stop dead in their tracks at the warehouse.